Perspective-free pragmatics: Broken precedents and the recovery-from-preemption hypothesis☆

The influence of partner-specific memory associations on language production: Evidence from picture naming

“…The present findings are also relevant to recent debates concerning the role of partnerspecificity in language comprehension (Barr & Keysar, 2002;Kronmüller & Barr, 2007;Metzing & Brennan, 2003). Metzing and Brennan (2003) found that addressees took longer to identify referents when a familiar speaker used a novel expression to refer to a familiar object, but not when a new speaker used the same expression to refer to the same object.…”

“…More recently, however, Kronmüller and Barr (2007) have argued that the influence of a prior expression upon reference resolution is not specific to any particular speaker. They suggest instead that the simple availability of previous referring expressions will "preempt" addressees from being able to easily interpret new descriptions intended to refer to familiar referents, and that slower and more effortful recovery processes are required when this occurs in the context of a familiar speaker.…”

Language in dialogue: when confederates might be hazardous to your data

“…According to this twostage theory, language processes are egocentric during initial processing, meaning that they do not take the needs or perspectives of conversational partners into account until later in processing (e.g., Barr & Keysar, 2005;Keysar, Barr, Balin, & Brauner, 2000;Keysar, Barr, Balin, & Paek, 1998;Kronmüller & Barr, 2007; see also V. S. Ferreira, Slevc, & Rogers, 2005, as well as Pickering & Garrod's, 2004, notion of "full common ground"-which mandates late processing-and Bard et al's, 2000, "dual-process theory"-which mandates late processing for some kinds of linguistic information). Therefore, speakers initially plan utterances independently from any partner-specific knowledge or cues about their addressees' informational needs, and addressees interpret utterances independently from the speakers' perspectives or communicative intentions (guided only by addressees' own perspectives or intentions).…”

“…For example, confederates' head movements or eye gaze can be scripted or occluded so as not to cue participants' responses (e.g., Barr & Keysar, 2002;Hanna & Brennan, 2007;Metzing & Brennan, 2003), or confederates may be trained to use the same intonation contour for their utterances across experimental conditions (e.g., Haywood et al, 2005). The confederates' verbal behaviors can be scripted or prerecorded in an attempt to prevent them from treating the subjects differently in different experimental conditions (e.g., Barr & Keysar, 2002;Kronmüller & Barr, 2007), although scripting raises additional concerns that we will discuss presently (see Concern 4 below).…”

“…While this may be necessary in some sorts of social psychology experiments, especially those that require deceit in order to believably stage an unusual or nonnormative social situation, in most language studies keeping a confederate's status hidden should not be an end in itself, especially when the goal is to model natural interaction. In fact, some who have gone to great lengths to conceal confederates' status in dialogue experiments have suggested that the subjects actually behaved no differently, whether they believed that they were interacting with confederates or with other naive subjects (Barr, 2008;Barr & Keysar, 2002;Kronmüller & Barr, 2007). Most importantly, even if an experiment succeeds in concealing a confederate's status, the confederate's behavior may differ sufficiently from that of a naive partner to implicitly shape the interaction in undesirable ways.…”